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Posted on 03/20/2006 10:46:38 PM PST by goldstategop
Horrifying stories about the rapes and murders of children, and about judges who go easy on sex offenders who prey on the young, have prompted some state legislatures to tighten up the laws and restrict the sentencing discretion of judges.
Few in the media or among the intelligentsia have been as outraged about these sadistic crimes against children as they have been about whether terrorists' phone calls have been intercepted.
Part of this is current politics but part of it is the continuation of a tradition that goes back more than two centuries, de-emphasizing the punishment of criminals.
People who today point to the flaws of "society" as the "root causes" of crime are echoing what was said in the 18th century by Condorcet in France and William Godwin in England, among others.
So are those who speak loftily of "alternatives to incarceration" or who continue to rely on hopes of "rehabilitation" or "prevention."
People with this mindset engage in much hand-wringing about what to do with sexual predators. While many ordinary people would say that they should be locked up -- and, if they are too dangerous to be at large, we should lock them up and throw away the key.
But those whose whole sense of themselves is based on their presumed superiority to ordinary people can never go along with such ideas. They balk even at notifying the public when some convicted sexual predator is released into their neighborhood.
Their thinking -- if it can be called that -- is that sexual predators who have been released from prison have "paid their debt to society" and so the slate should be wiped clean and these sadists allowed to hide their past.
It is amazing how many innocent young lives have been sacrificed for a half-baked phrase.
Going to jail doesn't repay anything. People are put behind bars as punishment and to keep them out of circulation. Child victims of rape and murder cannot be made whole. The debt can never be repaid.
The most we can hope for is to spare other children and their parents from the anguish inflicted by evil people -- not "sick" people, but evil people. Sexual predators know exactly what they are doing, know that it is wrong, and either don't care or enjoy it all the more for that reason.
Saying that they are "sick" implies that there is some treatment or cure that other people can apply to them. How many more lives are we prepared to sacrifice on the altar to that notion?
The illusion of being able to control sexual predators who are set loose in secrecy among families with children has taken many forms and has been couched in much soothing rhetoric.
"Supervised" parole is one of those soothing phrases. The reality is an occasional reporting to a parole officer who has huge numbers of parolees -- who cannot be controlled the other 99 percent of the time when they are not reporting.
The latest pretense of control is the global positioning satellite which can be attached to sexual predators.
Think about it. What would a global positioning satellite have told us when a sexual predator had two girls imprisoned in his basement? That he was home. What reassurance!
While rising public pressures to get serious about protecting children have forced some state legislatures to make some efforts in that direction, resistance and evasion are still the order of the day in many places.
In California, the state legislature is considering bills to use global positioning satellites to track released sex offenders -- but only those deemed "dangerous."
The sponsor of one of these bills describes GPS as "incredibly valuable technology." Not doubt it is -- if you are lost and want to find your way. On the other hand, if you don't want to be found, you can always take it off.
The bills in the California state legislature are presented as alternatives to a ballot initiative by which the voters could impose "Jessica's Law" with some real teeth in it as far as sentencing is concerned, instead of these political alternatives to reality.
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This is very morbid reasoning, but it's valid. It helps to ensure that rapists actually get caught and tossed in jail, and it protects the lives of rape victims. We get this in exchange for shorter sentences for rapists. This beats the hell out of not catching them at all.
I still say "poppycock".
Good Thomas Sowell article on the current child/rapist/deleted-adjective-judges insanity.
"Here's the deal: if there is no difference in penalty between a rape and a rape plus murder, then there is no reason for rapists not to murder their victims. Murdering the victim eliminates (in many cases) the only witness, so there's plenty of incentive to do it already. Not having any additional punishment for doing it aggravates this problem.
This is very morbid reasoning, but it's valid. It helps to ensure that rapists actually get caught and tossed in jail, and it protects the lives of rape victims. We get this in exchange for shorter sentences for rapists. This beats the hell out of not catching them at all."
I don't know if you know just how morbid the reasoning sounds. What happened to the reasoning that the mind of a rapist is really no different than the mind of a killer.
Might as well start teaching children in elementary school how to kill a rape attacker, because one thing is for certain, rapist do go free to rape again.
Not really. The predators can take injectable testosterone or other analogs and still function as predators. There are only two solutions to these predators and in particular those whom prey on children.
1. You can execute them.
2. You can lock them up for life with no parole. You can not cure a child predator!
A few generations ago rape was indeed a capital crime. A lot of people say that if rape was a capital crime, rapists would kill the victim. Did that happen more when rape was punished by execution?
I don't think so.
Here's a solution: Rape = quick execution. Rape+murder = slow painful death.
Plainly we can see that the current method of reasoning has not diminished the rapist population.
Can't argue with that reply.
I think so.
Otherwise it would go against the "normal" criminal behaviour.
The only way to know would be to look at crime stats from 40 plus years ago. Not just basic stats, but recidivism and the like.
The way things work now, criminals know that they will never face execution (except in Texas, thank God!), practically never die in prison unless another prisoner kills them, and likely serve one third of their actual sentence. That is, if they get arrested and then are judged guilty.
Bring back public pain and public shame and the crime rate will drop like a stone.
Since when is there such thing as "normal" criminal behavior? All criminal behaviour is abnormal.
Obviously: That's why I put it in quotes.
I hesitate to respond at all because I don't believe you are proposing that criminals act with total disregard to whether or not they get caught.
Of course they don't.
As Chesterton put it: "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
I do agree that crime has a social component and that values are key. Certainly the depression-era crime stats show this.
"Shame" is a reflection and measure of society - and family - values.
These certainly are lacking today, and increased crime results, very true.
thanks for your reply..
I've got to read some Chesterton.
Understand that we're not talking about people who have consensual sex with those a few months under the age of consent. As Sowell points out, on the contrary, these are people who absolutely know that what they are doing is wrong and harmful. "I couldn't help myself" is a lie - "I chose to do it" is the truth.
It has become unstylish to refer to the retributive aspects of incarceration and accentuate the therapeutic. But the retributive cannot be dismissed lest retribution fall to the citizen instead of the state. And a therapy with a 67% failure rate is not one I'd care to base the safety of society on afterward.
And so, I think, the correct course of action is long - very long - sentences for such crimes until such therapy may be found that has a better track record of protecting children from repeat offenders. There is a 33% population that can be reclaimed now, and if they face an inordinately long sentence because of the 67% that's too bad - it's something that they should have thought of before they chose to commit the crime.
Thanks!
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